Its both:
Leave Country A for Country B = expat
Move to Country B from Country A = immigrant
The words mean exactly the same. It's just which perspective you want to highlight. Whether you left a place or moved to a place.
Leave Country A for Country B = expat
Move to Country B from Country A = immigrant
The words mean exactly the same. It's just which perspective you want to highlight. Whether you left a place or moved to a place.
Expat literally means "living outside of your homeland". So by definition an immigrant is an expat, but an expat is not necessarily an immigrant. Sometimes expat is used in a stricter sense (also called "true expat") to refer to people sent abroad by their employer on usually very very favorable packages (the "expat packages"): everything paid (rent in prime neighborhoods, private schools for kids, plane tickets to visit home, etc.), on top of an indemnity for living abroad, on top of the regular salary paid home.
In my case I was an expat in the United States (only went there to work, no intention to stay), but then I immigrated to Japan (now a permanent resident, no intention to leave). It would have been wrong to call me an immigrant in the US, but I am both an expat and an immigrant in Japan.
H1B is dual-intent. You are allowed to have an immigrant intent when applying for H1B, so no, nobody would refuse it on that ground.
They were probably on a treaty visa, Like E2 (which i have, it's not just for business owners/investors, employees can get this too) or T2 (The NAFTA equivalent). These visas allow you to live and work in the US for a very long time (extendable indefinitely for 2 years a pop in my case), but they have no dual-intent attached to them. They are a dead-end and if you want to stay in the US you need to start from square one with an H1B/Marriage or convince your employer to start a standalone green card sponsorship, which costs like $50k and 2+ years of processing, where the only benefit to the employer is that you can now get a different job.
It's actually kind of a problem, there's a lot of people on these visas who've lived and worked here for 20+ years with no viable route to permanent residency.
This is the reason why I would not even consider moving to the US on a non-immigrant visa. It's either green card or I'm happy in the EU.
> It's actually kind of a problem, there's a lot of people on these visas who've lived and worked here for 20+ years with no viable route to permanent residency.
That's because the INA was written in the 50s and has barely changed since, and is unlikely to change because that would require bipartisanship.
Anyway: my point is that "immigrant" and "expat" are not synonyms: "immigrant" has a much narrower meaning, which has absolutely nothing to do with coming from a poor country or a rich country.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
In practice, though, "expat" is used by people who want to define themselves in terms of where they're from, and not admit (to themselves any more than to anyone else) that they are where they are and are probably going to stay there for the foreseeable future: "I don't belong to the riffraff here in the country where I live, I'm an expat, which is something far fancier."
And possibly by a few naïve fuckers who don't actually mean it that way, and don't realise that that's how they're coming off because of all the stuck-up arseholes who do.
HTH!
If you have pink skin, you're an ex-pat.
Come almost eight years later and we were eligible to apply for Belgian citizenship. Her employer had been spun off into a Belgian company, and they were not willing to continue to pay her as an ex-pat. So, it didn't make financial sense for us to remain in the country. So, we moved back to the US.
We never had any plans to permanently move to Belgium, so we weren't immigrants.
But it was fun being ex-pats for a while.